by Martin Perry
“I was kidnapped while we in Cirramorr. They held me below ground and I had to escape through a sewer. We don’t know why they took me, we don’t know what they expected to gain from the torture I suffered.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Champion asked.
“Us. The Free Man Nation,” said the saboteur confidently, daring to raise himself up from the floor and to his knees. He was met with sharp, threatening glances ushering his silence.
“Yes, ‘they’ are the Free Man Nation. ‘They’ are apparently a rather influential organisation with links that stretch the length and breadth of known space. A historian on Pura told us they are fighting to send us back to how life was before the Collapse.”
“Our cause,” said the saboteur with venom, “is to return Man to his rightful place, on the rightful planet...”
He was interrupted with a swift open-palmed slap to the back of his head from Charles. It was met with a whimper.
“Whatever it is,” Maur said with calm acceptance of the violence,
“They were the reason we lost the food too. They tracked me down again and we ended up exchanging rounds in the streets. It was a mess, I’m surprised we even got off the planet. This piece of shit must have got aboard somehow while we were on Seeon. We didn’t think to do a sweep of the scout Captain, I’m sorry.”
Champion looked at Maur intently, feeling some sympathy as the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. It was surprising that they hadn’t called for back-up on Cirramorr, although he imagined this was just down to them not wanting to bring the fight near Annie and her long suffering crew.
He appreciated that, but it did not entirely quell his anger.
“Explain yourself,” he said to the saboteur. “How did you get aboard my ship?”
“The fund transfer,” replied the saboteur, paying respect to the still considerable rage behind the blood-spattered man’s eyes. “It allowed me to track your panels. All I had to do was follow you back to the scout and wait for the right opportunity. When you were in the Council buildings I got aboard, you didn’t lock the vehicle, and shoved myself inside the maintenance hatch. It is remarkable I made it through the atmosphere alive. I have the quality of your ship to thank for that I guess, even if the stench of alien life emanates from every crack and crease.”
The honesty reflected the calm that was beginning to fill the Captain’s quarters, even if little of it was coming from his direction, as the parties in the room got more comfortable with each others presence.
Remaining rigid, the saboteur had weighed up his options, and decided that co-operation here would neither increase nor decrease the severity of the punishment that the Nation would put upon him for failing to disable the Jump Cannon completely. It might, however, limit the pain he would have to endure in the meantime.
“That means the hotel owner was in on it, he must have alerted you to the transfer being completed,” Thom said, hands now free from his face and his mind wholly interested in the unfolding story. The saboteur nodded in reply.
“Are you kidding?,” Kerra said. “The fucking hotelier was part of the Free Man Nation?”
“Is, he is part of the Free Man Nation, not was,” replied the saboteur. “Not that you will find any way of proving it. There exists no guilt in being a member of the Nation.”
“Well you better learn to feel guilt,” she snarled, “because we don’t forgive.”
Through this Marc 14 remained quiet, choosing to stand behind Champion and listen intently to the facts being presented. He had no doubt that the saboteur’s words were true, after all he was taking pride in imparting this knowledge, but one prominent question sat at the front of his mind. It was a shame that Yazram was holed up in the medical bay and could not force the answer. He would have liked to have seen the seetan painfully pull the information from this scumbag’s head, but a simple query would have to suffice.
“None of this explains,” Marc 14 said, “why you are so interested in our simple friend here?”
Everybody looked toward Maur in unison, who while being lost in the deep conversation had forgotten about the pain in his knee. Now, under the watchful stares of his colleagues the suffering flared up again, self-awareness jogging his memory of the injury. It was a question which he wanted to ask himself, but did not understand why everybody was looking to him for answers. Fortunately, the legitimate source of the reply spoke up in his defence.
“Your friend will lead us to a power,” said the saboteur magnanimously.
“I can assure you,” offered Kerra, enraged by her interpretation of the suggestion, “that Maur has no interest in becoming your leader, you pathetic little shit.”
“No listen properly you ignorant...” He stopped himself, not wishing to antagonise his captors. “What I mean to say, is not that he would be our leader, but instead that he would lead us to a power. He is the key to discovering a weapon that will offer us the superiority required to carry out our plans to fruition.”
“I have no idea about any weapons. I think you are your friends are barking up the wrong tree,” Maur replied smugly trying to cover his growing fear.
“That is where you are wrong. I am not senior enough within the Nation to be imparted with the full knowledge, but I do know that the Nation leadership would not be so overt in their operations were they not absolutely certain. Your escape from the interrogation facility and your subsequent victory over one of our smaller squads meant that I was called in, a specialist.”
“For a specialist you have done a remarkably bad job of destroying our ship,” said 14.
“My orders,” he growled, “were to disable the ship’s flight capabilities, rendering it unable to proceed to any port. After which I was to launch a beacon that would bring my fellow Nation members to your front door, where the Jump Cannon and your colleague were to be seized. I have not completed this task successfully, as you might guess, as the Nation had no intent to recover a crashed ship from the surface of an unknown planet. I understand a seetan intervened. How apt that the Nation’s work was held back by the efforts of an alien.”
Marc 14 laughed at the use of the word, so antiquated and quaint. As a lunark child he had heard of human prejudice towards other species, but had not been born young enough to experience any of it. It was a concern of his ancestors, not of the modern day.
“You scoff lunark, but mankind has been irrecoverably damaged thanks to the likes of you and all those who are just as foreign. The Free Man Nation can only hope to return us to an imperfect version of the past because of aliens. We may never again know the warmth of the atom bomb, the beauty of fossil fuel, a world without near-quantum travel...”
The saboteur had lost himself in a fever of his own beliefs and was muttering incoherently about relics of the past. Very little of it made sense to the others in the room, and they had little patience for it. Heads dipped down as each of them considered their catastrophic circumstances.
“Captain, we have a preliminary damage report for you, I think you should have a look at it,” came a voice from above, calling down the stairs into the quarters. Maur hoped that they had not been listening for long, the words of the saboteur gave him a direct association to the damage and he was embarrassed by it.
“Come down, there is nothing you should not be party to anyway crewman” Champion replied.
Despite reassurances, the steps down were made cautiously. It was a female member of the command deck team, and she looked around nervously at quarters she had never been party to before. In the curiosity she almost lost sight of her objective and had to be prompted by Champion shaking his hand towards her to hand over the panel. He scanned down, ticking off the list with a finger and estimating under his breath.
“OK,” he sighed. “There is work to be done. The hull should hold up still, we’ll be able to breach the atmosphere, but the engines are a mess. We’ll need to relocate fuel cores and then we might, and I want to emphasise might, be able to restore full near-quantum capabilit
y. The life support systems are the most immediately concerning. We can’t stay locked inside Annie for much longer, we’ll have to open the hangar door to let in air. Tests show the outside atmosphere is perfectly breathable even if the air is a little thin. The atmosphere is blocking communications some how, although those systems are mostly broken too. The life support is the real problem, the really big problem. It’d be suicide to get off this rock right now...”
Champion paused again, giving Maur time to look at Kerra with a desperate look. She offered him comfort with a slow rubbing hand on his back, a gesture he would never have expected before.
“We’ll need to send out teams to hunt and gather. There will be edible vegetation I am sure, although I’d like to continue eating red meat where possible,” said an awoken Champion. “To be honest, if we find the right resources we may well find ourselves eating far better than we would have otherwise. At least I have a decent reason for the missing food supplies now.”
He was talking to everybody and nobody all at once, directing his words to the listening audience in only general terms. Champion was tapping his chin, the rage draining away from him toward a more tolerable equilibrium. He began to feel stupid for removing his shirt, especially in front of the crewman in front of him. The shower systems were still functional enough for him to wash some of the embarrassment away, but for the time being he would have to do with wrapping his white shirt across his blood-stained body. He did so, and began to lead the crewman back up the stairs, his head still firmly in the data being presented on the panel in his hands.
“Kerra, take Maur to Beatrice in the medical bay. I’m sure the good doctor can do something about that knee. Charles, Thom, determine if our unwelcome guest has any useful skills that might see us return full function to the Jump Cannon. We have few too men and women for anybody to slack, and I have no intention of keeping a corpse aboard while the life support systems do not properly function. He will have to earn his stay. Too many questions remain to kill him where he stands.”
After the Captain left, with Marc 14 in his wake, Kerra lifted Maur to his feet. The walk to the medical bay wasn’t long, but every step brought further burning pain, tears welling in Maur’s ducts as they tried to talk. Crew members rushed past them, desperately trying to make progress against the orders that Champion was beginning to send out to panels and over the audio system.
“This isn’t your fault you know,” Kerra said with care. “Whatever information these people think they have on you, they are obviously nuts. After all, I’m sure if you had some almighty weapon, you wouldn’t be working as a maintenance boy.”
“Hah. Thanks, but he wouldn’t have bombed the ship if it weren’t for me. You’d all be better without me, I should have just stayed on Pura after the shooting, I had no right to come back aboard after putting you all in danger like that,” said Maur.
“Stop talking shit Maur,” she said. “You haven’t got a clue about what they want, you couldn’t control any of this. As much as you might like to think it does, known space does not revolve around your actions.”
“Well, I must have done something to warrant the attention.”
“They are just ill-informed headcases who think they are on some righteous quest. You’ve just ended up a target. I won’t put up with you moping Maur, that’s not the man I thought I knew so well...”
In her haste to reassure him she had almost let her emotions get the better of her, instead she coughed downwardly and faced the ground.
Dr. Beat met them at the door shortly after, relieving her but leaving Maur with frustration and an eagerness to continue the conversation. He would have reciprocated any sentiment. Kerra’s act of rescue had burst the restraints holding back his own feelings, he had been so relieved to see her. Not only that, but despite their peril he had lost himself in her. Warmth had filled his heart, he had forgotten about the impending disaster and instead had focused on Kerra. He could find no other reason for that but love. His injury, which had acted as a catalyst for the situation in which he had formed this realisation, also hampered the expression of its results. Shyness and a lack of confidence returned, and he was silenced into leaving her at the door of the medical bay.
Below, in Champion’s quarters, Thom and Charles continued to press the saboteur for information. For all who had heard the exchange, and the reason for the attack, there had been left a chilling thought in their minds. After all this, after their sheer perseverance after the Los Piratas attack, each of the parties was resolute in their belief that they would continue to be hunted by the Nation. Just as Charles had expected, they had not been prepared, but the saboteur seemed to have nothing to say that might alleviate that in the future. The Free Man Nation continued to have the upper hand.
“Our continued exploration of unknown planets can not be guaranteed to yield profit, this has been shown to be unquestionably true. Less than one in five colonised planets generates revenue greater than its total cost to the combined governments of Earth. These outposts can only be sustained if they can be turned into successful businesses within a reasonable period of time. These were never noble attempts to spread man’s influence throughout the universe, they were intended to make money – something they are failing to do.
I motion that we cease all further colonisation and the refurbishment of new planets, that all funds allocated to such endeavours be diverted into the existing planetary bodies and that all existing bodies be places on a five year business development plan. Any planets failing after this period will be de-colonised.
The Earthbound Colonisation Force would be re-purposed as a defensive entity for the protection of humankind throughout known space.”
Part of a speech made by Mohammed Luc Edard, International Minister for Universal Business Development that led to the permanent suspension of human colonisation efforts. These measures pre-date Kerra’s joining of the Earthbound Colonisation Force by more than a decade.
Chapter Seventeen
“Our field team will need to consist of non-essential personnel,” Champion ordered, “or at least non-essential to the repair efforts. That means all gunnery, maintenance and engineering staff will not be leaving Annie for the foreseeable future. Our military staff are low in number right now. That means Kerra and Charles will be heading out to hunt. Thom, you’ll be assisting since you’ll be cooking whatever we kill.”
“The three of you are to keep regular radio contact and are to broadcast back any intelligence that might assist the repair of the ship. I doubt we’re going to find ready-mined quarries or abandoned avionics factories but this is unexplored territory, so you never know. Away missions are to last no more than three hours.”
“Initial scans have been hampered due to system damage,” said Marc 14, “but there are definitely lifeforms scattered across the planet in reasonably dense numbers. We can’t get a read on what they are or what they look like, but the majority of wildlife seems to prefer to live alone. Should make it easier to hunt them down. Try and find a way of tapping the water sources too – I’d like to start pumping it into the ship.”
They were standing on the command deck twenty-hour hours after the initial landing, those given the proud title of “essential staff” were mostly absent. Other than a few deck staff it was mostly Beta Crew, with Yazram resting in his quarters after being brought back around. The four of them had gotten armoured and armed, ready to head out, including Maur.
He felt stupid as soon as Champion announced he was staying aboard, having made the assumption that he was indispensable as a soldier and donned his armour accordingly. He now had to stand and try to look natural while holding his rifle. Rolling his tongue over the top of his teeth, he held back the sort of outcry that was more often the product of humiliation than weakness. He wasn’t beyond getting emotional and the current circumstances warranted it. He stared ahead while the briefing continued.
"Make sure you are packing some varied ordnance, try and prepare for as many situa
tions as possible..."
Marc 14 was, in all truth, making some rather large leaps of faith when it came to the results of the scans. The ship’s power was being diverted away from analytical systems without human prompt, making any claims regarding the nature of the wildlife to be well-thought estimates and not much more. He figured that the team could handle themselves, which was true. Kerra and Charles both wore expressions that said they believed as much too. Thom looked far less sure, and search around for support to this cause. Unfulfilled, he began to fiddle with his rifle in frustration.
“Try not to kill much more than we need, this isn’t an ecosystem used to intelligent interference. The natural response to our presence could be drastic – plague, unexpected combustion, walking trees, all that could happen and all of it would give away our location. I don’t want to be the only sitting duck visible from space, especially with this Free Man Nation on our tail,” said Champion. “Am I understood?”
“Yes Captain,” came the uniform response from the assembled individuals, although some replied with more eagerness than others.
Maur slumped off to his quarters to get rid of the gun he had armed with unnecessarily, sulking and barely wishing the other three luck as he wandered off. That left them free to exit through the hangar, into the wild world that lay out in front of them.
Everything about the planet was big. Its surface size was impressive in itself, roughly one and a half times that of Uranus, but capable of supporting life. Green and purple were popular, giant contorted trunks stretching into the clouds. Their bases were lifted from the ground, creating dark caverns underneath every growth. These caves dripped and dropped, water seeping through the skin of the trees. They were havens for moss and algae that edged around temporary pools of stagnant water. Plant life was very different here, unlit swamps that birthed hardier plants than out in the sun.